Dean Koontz: Your Heart Belongs To Me

She rose from the armchair, but because the pistol remained trained on Ryan, he had no clear chance to get from the recliner to the coffee table.

“What accident do you refer to?” she asked.

“The car crash. Her head trauma.”

In the flat, uninflected voice of someone in a trance, Violet said, “Lily was in a car crash.”

Her celadon eyes were hard and cold and glazed. She moved slowly around the coffee table, diminutive but no less the predatory tiger.

“Listen…things happen,” Ryan said. “They just happen. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Things happen,” she said flatly. “Nobody’s fault.”

“If maybe…”

“If maybe?” she asked, pausing by the fireplace.

“If maybe you were driving, you can’t blame yourself.”

“You think I was driving.”

Anything he said could be the wrong thing to say, but silence might itself inspire her to shoot him.

“I don’t know. I just thought maybe that explains…explains the intensity of your feelings. Explains why…we’re here like this.”

If eyes revealed intentions, hers told him that he was a dead man. Her stare felt as sharp as shards of porcelain, shatters of her insane rage borne on her gaze.

“I was not driving, Mr. Perry, because there was no accident. No car crash, no head trauma, no international list. Fully alive, perfectly healthy, Lily was matched to you and then put to death so you could have her heart.”

Shaking his battered head made the throbbing pains swell stronger, striking up an internal sound like the repeated hard plucking of the bottom-note string on a bass fiddle, and fired off sharper pangs by the quiverful. Yet he shook his head, shook it, denying what Violet had said.

“Why did you fly to Shanghai for a transplant, Mr. Perry? Why all the way to Shanghai?”

“That’s where the car crash happened. She was on life support, brain-dead, they kept her alive until I could get there with Dr. Hobb and his surgical team.”

“Do you know what Falun Gong is, Mr. Perry?”

He shook his head. He didn’t know. She made it sound like he should, but he didn’t.

“Falun Gong is a spiritual practice expressed through certain exercises and meditations.”

“I never heard of it. Why should I?”

“It was founded in 1992 and banned in 1999 after ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners silently protested the government’s arrest and beating of many people in the city of Tianjin.”

Shaking his head not only exacerbated the pain but also cast his thoughts into a junkshop jumble, as an earthquake dumps the orderly contents of supermarket shelves onto the floor in a seismic potluck. Yet he continually shook his head, as though he didn’t want either the pain to stop or his thoughts to clear.

“A spiritual life is not an approved life. Half the people in my country’s labor-camp prisons are Falun Gong,” she continued. “They are beaten, worked to death, and tortured.”

Judging by the sound of her voice, Violet had moved around the La-Z-Boy, in back of him. He raised his head, and though his vision brightened and dimmed somewhat with the ebb and flow of the pain, he could see well enough to confirm that she was not in the part of the room that lay before him.

“Face forward,” she commanded. “Do not turn.”

Ryan did not think that she would shoot him in the back of the head. She would first want to hurt him more, and when the time came to finish it, she would want him to be staring down the muzzle of the gun when she squeezed the trigger.

“Lily was Falun Gong. A poor, sweet dreamer of a girl. My twin but nothing like me. My mind is darker, and my heart.”

As if she knew what he had thought, Violet pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the back of his skull, which forced him to stop shaking his head.

“Oh, God, don’t. You’re making a mistake.”

The round muzzle seemed to imprint a third eye in the back of his head, for when he closed the pair with which he had been born, he could see down the barrel to the bullet.

“Lily was a seamstress living on subsistence wages, seeking something to brighten and give meaning to her existence. Falun Gong.”

On his face, on his hands, on the chair, his spilled blood issued a faint odor that perhaps only he could smell, and nausea threatened.

She said, “They arrested Lily two years ago. I spent a year trying to get her freed, trying so cautiously, so surreptitiously.”

His darkness yawed like the deck of a ship, and he opened his eyes, fixing his stare on the armchair where previously she had been seated, forcing stillness on the room to stave off nausea.

“Forced labor, beatings, torture, rape-not all the Falun Gong prisoners are subjected to those things. Some are kept in good health to be harvested.”

A sob escaped Ryan, and he struggled to control himself, for he intuited that instead of earning sympathy for him, his tears would inspire only a murderous contempt. His best hope was steadiness, the exercise of restraint, and an appeal to reason.

“I never heard of Falun Gong,” he insisted. “Never.”

“There is a hospital in Shanghai that exists for two purposes only. First for certain…experiments. Second, to provide transplant procedures for exalted state officials in ill health and for wealthy foreigners who can meet the very high cost.”

To his surprise, the woman stepped into view again on his left side. She had pressed the muzzle so hard against the back of his skull that he felt the impression of it even after the pistol had been taken away.

“I learned three days before your surgery that Lily had been transferred from the labor camp to that hospital.”

She held the pistol in a two-hand grip, five feet from him, aimed at his throat but no doubt allowing for the barrel to pull up with the shot, to shatter his teeth with the bullet and to punch out the back of his head.

“My sweet Lily’s kidneys were needed by two comrades, her liver by another, corneas by a fourth, and her heart by some lord of the Internet, one of the hundred most eligible bachelors.”

He learned now a new thing: Fear could take such a grip on a man’s emotions that he could experience no other sentiment, on his intellect that he could think of nothing but dying, on his spirit that he could not hope, on his body that he could suddenly not feel the pain of terrible wounds, but could feel only terror with every fiber of his being.

“I didn’t know,” he groaned, but the words came from him without premeditation, like a chant or litany that had been repeated on ten thousand other occasions and was now, with thought denied him, the only thing he knew how to say.

“You knew,” she insisted.

“I swear I didn’t.” More litany. “I swear I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I couldn’t have done this if I’d known.”

“Dr. Hobb brings patients from around the world. Over the years, a hundred sixty of Dr. Hobb’s patients have been matched in a month or less. Dr. Hobb knows.”

“Maybe he does, I can’t speak for him, I can’t defend him. But I didn’t know.”

“They say so many have been harvested that where their bodies are buried, the ground grows red bamboo. Groves of red bamboo.”

“I didn’t know.”

She lowered the muzzle from his face, and the sound-suppressor on the pistol allowed only a soft and surprisingly biological sound when she shot him in the left foot.

Terror could not anesthetize against a bullet wound, at least not entirely, and it could not staunch the blood. But the wound proved less debilitating than Ryan would have imagined, producing not violent and thrilling throes of pain, not agony, but suffering of a kind that cleared his fogged thinking, that broke him out instantly in a head-to-foot sweat even as a chill settled through his stomach and his bowels, racking him with shudders that rattled his teeth.